I Bit the Head Off That Bat, Too
Hiding metal albums from your parents in the 1980s wasn’t merely some act of adolescent rebellion, but a kind of domestic espionage, equal parts cultural self-preservation and logistical absurdity. Consider the sheer physicality of fandom in that era, especially when your tastes leaned toward the sonically aggressive and parentally incomprehensible.
A significant portion of our readers may not fully understand what it meant to live in an era when the dominant medium for music consumption was neither concealable nor shrinkable. Just these unwieldy 12″ x 12″ slabs of cardboard and vinyl that announced their contents in shrieking, apocalyptic fonts. Imagine trying to sneak Blizzard of Ozz past your parents when it’s the size of a dinner plate.
By high school, my parents were probably braced for the depravity dial on my music obsession to spin out. I knew who Ozzy Osbourne was well before junior high. The groundwork had been laid around 1976, when I started reading Creem magazine more or less obsessively, ostensibly for its Kiss coverage, but also because Creem, in its snide, half-ironic way, kept name-dropping this other band, Black Sabbath. Of course, I should pause here to note, if only for the sake of context, that I started reading Creem in fourth grade, which, looking back, renders the whole scenario a bit off-kilter in a way that didn’t strike me at the time.
By junior high, I’d already heard my first Black Sabbath record, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), bought by a friend who paid for it with lawn-mowing cash, which now feels almost folkloric. Honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d bought it solely for the cover art—this lurid, deeply disturbed tableau by Drew Struzan of some half-naked figure mid-torment, surrounded by clawed grotesques, the number 666 floating above the bed, the whole thing soaked in reds so aggressive they almost hum. Then countered by the contemplative blues of the back cover, which initially tempered the front’s hellish overload, but soon felt like the slow pull of original sin.
When the needle dropped, the turntable made this faint but audible effort, as though the record itself was somehow too heavy. What came out was bottomless and sacred in a way I didn’t yet have language for, something that made the air feel thicker, denser. The kind of memory that replays itself in your head decades later.
By the time I finally saw Ozzy Osbourne live, in the flesh, I was 16, steeped in that volatile stew of adolescent rage and suburban stagnation that felt like a fist pounding against a locked interior door. The guitarist from my garage band drove us to Atlanta in his windex-blue 1974 Camaro, rattling like a shopping cart of bricks. We landed ten rows from the stage, where adoration crashes into anarchy.
That concert happened in the spring of 1984. Bark at the Moon dropped the previous November, and by then Ozzy was a snarling, bleeding myth, held together by volume and sheer will. The album cover features Ozzy fully monstered-up, straight out of a Saturday matinee nightmare: not the classic, jumpsuit-wearing Lon Chaney Jr. werewolf, but something more feral and cinematic—think An American Werewolf in London (1981). Ozzy spent six hours in makeup to become that beast (courtesy of Greg Cannom, the same guy who would later turn Gary Oldman into that blood-romantic in Coppola’s Dracula), and you get the sense Ozzy didn’t have to act too much.
Take the album cover and the lyrics to the title track at face value, assuming one informs the other, and the song is about a werewolf who returns from the dead, frothing with revenge after being buried in a nameless grave and laboring in hell for a while. This interpretation, however, is confounded somewhat by the video (which debuted on MTV nearly three weeks before Michael Jackson‘s “Thriller”), the first Ozzy Osbourne song to have a conceptual music video.
Set in a Victorian gothic world, Ozzy plays a mad scientist who concocts a potion that turns him into a werewolf—only to be forcibly committed to a sanatorium (where parts of the video were actually filmed), with the werewolf version of himself chasing the doctor through narrow boiler-room passages.
One might have a psychoanalytic field day here, discussing the Jekyll and Hyde motif as some Freudian take on Ozzy Osbourne’s attempts to control his darker impulses while dealing with alcoholism and the loss of guitarist Randy Rhoads. Then again, a Jungian lens might turn this whole thing a bit and align the werewolf with Jung’s Shadow archetype, where the lunar lunatic becomes a personification of Ozzy’s darker, animalistic, and immoral self.
Of course, Jung believed that confronting and integrating the Shadow is crucial for psychological wholeness—a process that, in theory, demands self-awareness and a level of spiritual maturity most adults can’t muster, let alone hormone-rattled teenagers.
Yet, leaving the parking deck and making our way toward the arena that night, it became immediately apparent that some folks out there had taken it upon themselves to project the Shadow rather than integrate it, as evidenced by the pamphlet-disseminators flanking the main entrance, grim-faced emissaries of some loosely affiliated evangelical effort whose materials, if you actually read them, bore only the faintest trace of actual scripture and instead leaned heavily on apocalyptic shorthand: lake of fire, beasts, marks, end times, etc.
Not much about Jesus (who barely made an appearance), but more like Revelation fan-fiction stripped of context, all fire and beasts with no mercy or messiah. The message wasn’t exactly clear (as A didn’t lead to C, or even really B), but the tone was unmistakable—accusatory, urgent, vaguely disgusted, and clearly aimed at Ozzy or maybe all of us by association. Even at sixteen, the episode read as a kind of moral panic, as though we’d walked into someone else’s hallucination.
That was 1984, after all, and what we now retroactively tag as the “Satanic Panic” was already crawling out of the cultural woodwork, pointing its trembling finger at whatever happened to be the least easily absorbed into the Reagan-era delusion of moral cleanliness and upward momentum. Ozzy Osbourne somehow ended up the bleating goat led up the cultural altar, twitching under the weight of everyone else’s horned-head hysteria, because there’s something perversely satisfying, and cosmically tidy, about projecting your darkest fears onto a guy who once bit the head off a bat and looked mildly horrified when it bled.
As someone who’s had decades to loop back and rethink all this, Ozzy seems less a corrupter than a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Whatever America was most afraid of at the moment—suburban family collapse, moral entropy, middle-class fallout, distortion pedals—he somehow became a vessel for the great American living-room unraveling, which is both pathetic and sort of miraculous when you think about it.
The part no one in the pamphlet brigade seemed interested in noticing is that Ozzy wasn’t leading anyone astray. If you actually take the time to listen to what’s happening underneath the spectacle, past the theatrics, you’ll hear something far more complicated. His body of work, with Black Sabbath and solo, doesn’t celebrate evil so much as name it: war, ecological collapse, addiction, alienation, inner torment— you know, the shit people deal with. Ozzy didn’t dial it down, either. He howled, and there’s always been something redemptive in that howl that wants to crawl back toward the light. Even his onstage sign-off—”God bless you all”—never felt like shtick. You knew he meant it, or at least I did.
Like a million others, I’ll say the same old line, not out of laziness but because it’s true: Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath sparked my obsession with heavy music. Not just music, but the whole aesthetic orbit around it, the strange beauty in the distorted. Without that spark, my interior world would be thinner, safer, duller. More than that, without Ozzy as an accidental patron saint of the weird kids, a lot of us might’ve sleepwalked into the plastic-wrapped version of life they start handing you around 11th grade. Instead, we learned how to defend the outlier within, to give the strange voice in our heads a little more room to breathe, even if it sometimes screamed.
— Matthew McEver
A Kaleidoscope of Melody and Madness
I’m just of the age where I didn’t fully start digging into music until the early 1980s, which meant that Ozzy Osbourne didn’t sing on the first Black Sabbath music I ever heard. When I delved into their back catalog, however, the chemistry of that original lineup hit me in a way that only a handful of bands ever have. I look back with tremendous fondness at the days when I wandered the streets of New York City as a 12-year-old with my yellow auto-reverse Sony Walkman, completely enraptured by the song “A National Acrobat”. To this day, that song takes the cake as one of the most powerful musical experiences of my life.
The way Ozzy’s voice trails off when he sings lines like “Well, I know it’s hard for you / To know the reason why” speaks to a vibration in my being that has always felt like a message from somewhere deep within the soul of the universe. I’ve never quite been able to discern what the message is, because the goosebump-y sensation I get transcends the actual words themselves. Those words, in any case, were written not by Osbourne, but by bassist Geezer Butler, who, for my money, is one of the most poetic—indeed romantic—lyricists rock music has ever given us. Nevertheless, Ozzy did a beautiful job of embodying whatever Butler’s imagination was channeling from the ether.
It didn’t take long after Ozzy Osbourne left Sabbath for him to transform into music’s answer to a pro-wrestler: goofy, over-the-top, and lovable but ultimately less of a musical presence than a kind of living, breathing action figure. It’s not like his antics weren’t satisfying. From biting the head off a bat to snorting ants poolside with members of Mötley Crüe to his gut-busting punchlines in Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization Part II to his ascent as a reality-TV icon, Osbourne gave us plenty to remember him by. Just to put this in perspective: the “Drugs” section of his Wikipedia page sprawls out at nearly ten paragraphs!
Hopefully, though, Osbourne will be remembered first and foremost for the voice that brought melody—and even a touch of airy grace—to so many songs. A devoted Beatles lover and an admirer of singers like Elton John and Peter Gabriel, at his most nimble Ozzy had a way of soaring above the infernal roar of riff-churning guitarists like Tony Iommi, Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee, Zakk Wylde, Joe Holmes, and Gus G. Where Black Sabbath’s range gave him ample runway to touch the stratosphere on genre-defying numbers like “Changes”, “Looking for Today”, “Over to You”, and others, Ozzy also scaled heights with his own bands too.
Of all the songs he released under his own name, the one that I come back to most often is “Flying High Again”. Originally released on his sophomore solo offering, 1981’s Diary of a Madman, “Flying High Again” perfectly captures Osbourne’s winning combination of tunefulness and spirit. It’s also hard to point to a more anthemic song in his entire body of work.
With substantial help from Rhoads and original Blizzard of Ozz rhythm section Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake, Ozzy Osbourne nailed the fist-pumping vibe of early 1980s metal—a paradigm he and his bandmates were instrumental in getting off the ground. Whether or not you care for that brand of metal, we’ve all come to regard that period through the rosy tint of nostalgia. That song, though, sent shivers up my spine well before Stranger Things crystallized our hunger for retro cool.
I can still remember bringing home the 1987 live album Tribute, released five years after Rhoads’ untimely passing. In that rendition, Ozzy’s voice in the chorus, again trailing in a glorious wash of reverb and delay, carries with it the intoxicating fragrance of summers past. No doubt Ozzy Osbourne’s prodigious drug use did real damage to his body—and, presumably, his mind as well.
However, there’s a delightful sense of playfulness when he sings, “I can see mountains, watch me disappear / I can even touch the sky / Swallowing colors of the sound I hear.” The studio version of “Flying High Again” reached number two on the Billboard chart, but it’s not like the song ever achieved status as the perennial staple it deserves to be. Now would be as good a time as any.
Monoculture may be fading before our very eyes, but I hope “Flying High Again” outlives Ozzy Osbourne’s legacy as rock’s most outrageous wildman. If you want to remember him with a smile on your face, I’d argue that there’s no better song to start with.
Hindsight would have us pretend the 1960s were all sunshine and rainbows, incense and peppermints, and good vibes only. Even the most casual pop culture historian will tell you that’s more than a slight distortion. Some historians suggest that hippies made up less than .2% of the American population by the end of the 1960s. Peace, love, and pacifism weren’t a luxury everybody could afford. Seventy-six percent of American soldiers in Vietnam came from lower-class or working-class backgrounds, for instance. Civil rights demonstrations and protests would frequently erupt into chaos and violence.
To put it bluntly, those who “have” got to have an idyllic, utopian existence that is still being romanticized and rhapsodized after nearly 60 years later. Those who “have not” got to have a remarkably different experience; navigating a morally bankrupt culture with nowhere to hide its hypocrisies, dealing with a whole new class of mass media ultraviolence scarring the collective psyche in ways previously unimagined. For every free love commune, there was a murderous, deranged Manson cult. Every consciousness-raising group had its equal and opposite Weathermen.
There was a lot of light in the 1960s, but there was a lot of darkness, too. To try and make sense of the collective consciousness of the latter half of the 20th century, you must look at both the light and the shadows. You can’t fully discuss The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch without considering The Addams Family or The Munsters. You can’t appreciate the full psychological depth of DC or Marvel superheroes without also considering the ghoulish counterpoint of EC Comics.
Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t afraid to delve into the shadows. He is the Prince of Darkness, after all. As such, he might be seen as an anti-hippy, a figure of depressed, rustbelt Birmingham rather than the peace and love of San Francisco. Instead of the flower power and prayer beads and beautiful people hinted at in songs like Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Wooden Ships”, Ozzy conjured an alternate counterculture of bikers and boogeymen, wizards and warlocks, serial killers and atom bombs, bad speed and bad vibes, like he’d given the late 20th century a spinal tap and was busily trying to instigate his acid flashback.
Just because he wasn’t afraid to gaze into the abyss doesn’t mean he was wallowing in it, though. Black Sabbath routinely wore crosses, after all, and not even inverted ones, to protect them from witches. Lester Bangs called Black Sabbath “the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don’t walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent”.
Due to a lifetime of shocking and aweing with grand guignol theatrics, Ozzy Osbourne got pigeonholed as a resurrection of “the wickedest man in the world”, the Great Beast 2.0 for the MTV Generation. That misses the point of Ozzy’s music and worldview. It’s full of witches and wizards, ghouls and ghosts, brutal battlefields where wars for the human soul were being waged. The witches to fear weren’t the ones riding skyclad on greased broomsticks. They were shadowy military ghouls perpetrating crimes against humanity in smoky, dimly lit backrooms.
To know your enemy, you’ve got to see them clearly. Ozzy Osbourne introduced us to them all: a heavy metal Hermit casting his lantern light on hideous truths impossible to look away from once they’re seen. He was a fearless, irreverent truth-seeker unafraid to shout truth to power. He will be dearly, dearly missed.
The Riff Heard ‘Round the World: Black Sabbath at Live Aid
July 13 marked the 40th anniversary of the Live Aid concerts, held primarily in London and Philadelphia, as well as other cities around the world. Typically, retrospectives about the legendary concert to alleviate famine conditions in Ethiopia focus on the great (performances by Queen, David Bowie, and U2, among others), the abysmal (a woeful set by Led Zeppelin members), and the novel (Phil Collins‘ trans-Atlantic antics, and Bob Dylan‘s stray remarks that led to the Farm Aid series of concerts).
Live Aid was at least 16 hours long (longer if you factor in Oz for Africa, which happened in Sydney, Australia), and a whole lot can happen in that much time. Many artists showed up, gave great performances, and headed off to their next gigs, to eventually be overshadowed in Live Aid mythology by Queen (and yes, Freddie and the boys were indeed brilliant that day). However, take the only time over 15 years that all four original members of Black Sabbath took the stage together.
Black Sabbath were practically a non-entity in July 1985. Ozzy Osbourne was deep into his solo career, and the band hadn’t released an album since 1983’s Born Again, the only Sabbath record to feature Ian Gillian as lead vocalist. But at 9:55 on Live Aid morning, Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward, took the stage together and turned John F. Kennedy Stadium in South Philadelphia into a seething caldron of head-banging metal maniacs.
It was glorious, and I know this because I was there. Between 9:00 am and noon in Philly that day, those of us at JFK were treated to one of the most bizarre concerts-within-a-concert you can imagine: Joan Baez, Hooters, Four Tops, Billy Ocean, Black Sabbath, Run-D.M.C., Rick Springfield, REO Speedwagon, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Judas Priest. The sheer variety of acts during that sliver of time was bewildering. Yet, it soon became apparent that, as an audience, we were ready to love everything that came our way, including the reunited-and-it-temporarily-feels-so-good Black Sabbath.
Grainy YouTube videos tell the story better than I can. Despite the fragile nature of their relationships, the founding members of Black Sabbath brought their A-game to Live Aid. Ward and Butler beautifully and brutally anchor the songs, and Iommi’s guitar playing is stunning.
However, above all, there is Ozzy, throwing himself into three Sabbath classics, “Children of the Grave,” “Iron Man,” and “Paranoid”, with abandon. Ozzy reminded the crowd repeatedly to “go crazy” and asked God to bless us several times. Prince of Darkness? Yes, of course, but on stage that day, Osbourne radiated positive energy and joy, and the crowd at JFK that morning devoured it.
It would be seven years before the original Black Sabbath lineup would play together again. Four decades later– with the happy knowledge that Ozzy managed to outlive his demons— I’m still thrilled that I spent 20 minutes with him, Black Sabbath, and thousands of metalheads at Live Aid.
Long live Ozzy Osbourne.
Late July 1986, I was 14, and my uncle jerked the patio door and yelled to turn the television down as Ozzy Osbourne’s video for “Lightning Strikes” played on MTV. “You can hear that all the way in the yard,” he said, being a dick. He married my aunt five years earlier and could be touchy. I didn’t know that he had a good reason, though. It wasn’t until recently, while writing this article, that I read civil trial transcripts and better understood why Uncle James was so worried about the neighbors,
I was a teenage metal fan, visiting family in Fitzgerald, Georgia. My uncle was a prominent doctor in a community of ten thousand residents, a member of the church choir, a man of God, and a leader. He would have known that, two months earlier, on 3 May 1986, a 16-year-old Fitzgerald resident died by suicide. The boy’s grieving parents blamed Ozzy Osbourne and claimed their son was influenced by “Suicide Solution” from Blizzard of Ozz (1980), a staple of Ozzy’s live shows, usually featuring an extended guitar solo from the various shred masters in the band over the years.
I knew of Black Sabbath and Ozzy from Circus and Hit Parader, and as a huge Mötley Crüe fan, I’d read all about their wild tour antics opening for him. But I was grossed out by whatever nastiness fell from his mouth on the cover of Speak of the Devil (1982). I wouldn’t have called myself a fan until that summer of 1986 and The Ultimate Sin record.
We didn’t have cable at home in rural Kentucky, so visits to my family in southern Georgia were opportunities to binge hair metal videos. Every summer, I spent almost two months at my grandmother’s house. Metal dominated MTV, and that season featured “Shake Me” by Cinderella, “Yankee Rose” by David Lee Roth, and the gargantuan, omnipresent “Home Sweet Home” from Crüe. As well as clips from The Ultimate Sin.
“Shot in the Dark” was the first single, and its opening bass line grabbed me, an odd experience for a lead guitar fanatic in the era of guitar heroes. Written by bassist Phil Soussan, the riff rides a series of repetitive eighth notes, varied through a combination of downstrokes, upstrokes, and alternate picking. Drummer Randy Castillo’s sound is massive, and guitarist Jake E. Lee comes in with a piercing whammy maneuver.
The video mixes concert performances with a storyline involving a group of fans attending the show. Actress Julie Gray suffers from blinding headaches and glowing eyes as the spirit of metal possesses her, transforming her into the otherworldly figure in tiger-striped pants from the album cover, as a young Dweezil Zappa watches.
The second single was “Ultimate Sin”, and the video combines live performance with scenes of Ozzy wearing a cowboy hat and a gray three-piece suit, riding in a limo with steer horns on the hood like a demented J.R. Ewing. He is alternatively enticed and tormented by the apparition of Gray from the “Shot in the Dark” video. The performance scenes feature the universe of can lights that hang over Ozzy’s massive stage like a multi-colored constellation.
“Lightning Strikes” was the third video release, but the non-single tracks were equally strong. “Never Know Why” opens with a haunting, sustained guitar line from Jake E. Lee before the band come roaring in. “Killer of Giants” and “Thank God for the Bomb” both tackle nuclear war because it was the mid-1980s after all. I devoured The Ultimate Sin when it came out, and I still love and defend that record.
The following summer in Fitzgerald, 1987, an older friend played me the live version of “Suicide Solution” from the newly released Tribute. The record featured recordings from Ozzy’s 1980/1981 tours with the late Randy Rhoads, who had died in a plane crash. His guitar solo in “Suicide Solution” prompted Patrick to declare, “That’s the greatest guitar player who ever lived”. Many metalheads would agree, or at least entertain the debate.
By this point, even a visitor like me knew that there was a kid who died and whose parents held Ozzy responsible. Rumors were that the youth-gone-wild of Fitzgerald, at least the ones who liked metal and had loud sound systems in their vehicles, organized a sort of ear-splitting torment-slash-protest. They planned to drive by the family home of the deceased teen broadcasting “Suicide Solution” at all hours of the night. I never heard that they actually did it, because, 40 years ago, even shithead kids still had some vestiges of decency. In today’s YouTube and social media world, I’m not so confident that this generation would decline the clicks and the ability to own anyone, even bereaved parents.
Tribute introduced me to Ozzy’s early work and cemented my status as a full-fledged fan. The live recording featured Ozzy on vocals, Rhoads on guitar, Rudy Sarzo on bass, and Tommy Aldridge on drums. It opened with “Carmina Burana” chanting through the speakers—a dramatic intro I recognized from Excalibur—and soon learned Ozzy used it regularly to kick off his shows.
I quickly grasped why my metal colleagues raved about “Flying High Again” and “I Don’t Know.” Having just read Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, I was already familiar with Aleister Crowley, so Ozzy’s song, named after the infamous occultist, conjurer, and charlatan, jumped out at me. Curiously, “Crazy Train” didn’t blow me away at first. It wasn’t until years later, after playing the song next to Rudy Sarzo himself, the Heavy Metal Dalai Lama, veteran of Ozzy, Quiet Riot, Whitesnake, Dio, and others, that I finally understood the allure. The propulsion of that song is like a geyser eruption.
On 28 April 1988, the teenage suicide victim’s family filed a $9 million lawsuit against Ozzy, CBS Records, and the writers of “Suicide Solution”, alleging that the lyrics, music, and subliminal messages caused the wrongful death of their son. Meanwhile, in October of that year, Ozzy released No Rest for the Wicked, featuring a new hotshot guitar player, Zakk Wylde, a skinny kid with long straight hair from Bayonne, New Jersey. His style was aggressive and employed pinch harmonics, which create a sort of squeal sound.
The first single, “Miracle Man”, was a broadside attack on recently disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, where Ozzy sings of “a devil with a crucifix… [who] needs another carnal fix”. In the video, Ozzy and Wylde even take turns wearing a Swaggart Halloween mask while the singer herds pigs into a church with a staff topped by a dollar sign— not the first time Ozzy spoofed overzealous religious critics.
He made his film debut as Reverend Aaron Gilstrom in the horror movie Trick or Treat (1986). The singer was presumably tired of the hypocrites who loudly preached about faith by attacking loud music. In hindsight, the two sides of the argument needed each other. Ozzy’s career probably benefited from the clergy as much as their donations grew from scaring parents about him.
In the fall of 1991, Ozzy released the landmark No More Tears album, a proper, adult, lasting rock record, not easily dismissed by critics as hair metal fluff. I was a freshman in college and no longer spent weeks on end with my family in Georgia. In my dorm room, MTV was on around the clock.
The first single, “No More Tears”, is an ominous, foreboding tune that perfectly aligns with other cultural milestones, such as The Silence of the Lambs, released the same year. The ballad “Mama, I’m Coming Home” cemented itself as an Ozzy signature song. The album also contained “Road to Nowhere”, the first in what I consider to be Ozzy’s Regret Library.
Ozzy Osbourne’s career and cultural impact are as much about debauchery and hedonism as they are about his music. Biting bats, pissin’ on the Alamo, snorting ants with the Crüe, arrests, and bad behavior make the Ozzy legend what it is. However, I always admired his ability to acknowledge the downside of this behavior vulnerably. “Road to Nowhere” includes the lines, “The wreckage of my past keeps haunting me. It just won’t leave me alone.”
He revisits this theme in 2001’s “Running Out of Time,” singing, “I wouldn’t wish my hell on you… picking up the pieces of my mind, running out of faith and hope and reason”. It’s tough to imagine other rockers of the era being so open about the cost of the lifestyles they bragged about in earlier decades.
In 1991, the US District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, Albany/Americus Division, ruled in Ozzy Osbourne’s favor in the lawsuit concerning the teenager’s suicide. The court found that the plaintiffs failed to prove the existence or influence of subliminal messages in his music. However, it acknowledged “no doubt as to the sincerity of their motives in following through with what must be an extremely painful course of action”. Ozzy won other similar lawsuits in the early nineties, as did his heavy metal peers Judas Priest.
In 1992, I saw Ozzy live in Memphis at the Pyramid—possibly the worst concert venue in the history of humanity. The show was part of his No More Tours run. At 44, he was said to be worn out from years of self-inflicted damage. It was billed as his final tour. The farewell tour trope would become a joke in future years with bands like Kiss, Scorpions, Mötley Crüe, and others, but we all believed Ozzy. No one could argue that he deserved some rest and relaxation.
The only song he played from The Ultimate Sin that night was “Shot in the Dark”. In later interviews, Ozzy was outspoken about it being his least favorite solo album and singled out producer Ron Nevison for doing a poor job. In the early 2000s, I met Nevison and made a point of complimenting him on Sin. He was an engineer on Physical Graffiti and Quadrophenia. He produced Thin Lizzy, Kiss, and the mammoth 1985 self-titled album from Heart that sold almost six million copies. He didn’t need my validation of his work, but I wanted to share how important The Ultimate Sin was to me.
We don’t choose when we’re born, nor do we select which era of an artist we first encounter. The universe exposes us as it deems appropriate. It’s no one’s fault if they discovered U2 through the imperially forced Apple inclusion or R.E.M. through “Shiny Happy People”. Hopefully, we will come to appreciate the full breadth of that artist’s career, encompassing both the highs and the lows.
I am grateful and unashamed that I encountered Ozzy Osbourne – in all his sequined, padded shoulder Bea Arthur glory – through The Ultimate Sin. As lawsuits, the Satanic Panic, and televangelists faded, as spandex and makeup were discarded from tour buses, as grunge washed over heavy metal and then receded, as Ozzy and his family became reality stars. The Prince of Darkness ascended to his rightful throne as metal royalty, and my life was forever altered by that 1986 discovery in a small town in Georgia.
Ozzy purists might sneer at the record, but I am one of them now, because of it. While I do consider myself a heavy metal expert, I never judge another listener’s introduction to the genre.
The name of the teenager and his bereaved family were intentionally omitted from this article. The media coverage and legal documents are widely available online if you want to read further.
If you or someone in your life needs immediate help due to having suicidal thoughts, call, chat, or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or text the Crisis Text Line by texting “START” to 741-741. If there is an immediate safety concern, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
